The growing awareness of potential acts of bioterrorism from both international and domestic terrorist groups has accentuated concern about the ability of the nation's laboratory infrastructure to respond to a widespread threat, and has increased concerns about the security of biological and chemical agents handled in research environments. While the potential of biological and chemical warfare and terrorism is neither new nor previously unrecognized, the actual implementation of such a bioterrorist attack on US soil sharply increased public and worker concern. It also increases the probability that other terror groups will seek to follow suit now that the vulnerabilities have been exposed.
In particular, the anthrax attacks of late 2001 highlighted major vulnerabilities of the federal and corporate mail and package handling systems to adequately contain biological and chemical agents. The contamination of the Hart senate office building exposed the basic vulnerability of office complex design to bioterror agents delivered in the mail, or by other means.
In response to these actual and perceived threats, there has been a dramatic increase in funding, both at home and abroad, for research directed to furthering our understanding of bioterrorism agents and to developing more effective countermeasures. For example, biodefense expenditures in the 2002 U.S. budget amounted to $1.4 billion; a further supplemental appropriation in the wake of September 11 added an additional $3.7 billion. The Presidents 2003 budget, summarized in the document “Securing the Homeland, Strengthening the Nation” (Policies in Focus: February 2002) proposed $5.89 billion for defense against bioterrorism. This increase in research activity is heavily straining the small number of existing research facilities capable of handling the most potentially dangerous infectious agents. Thus, as the world prepares itself for the reality of bioterrorism, practical and cost effective approaches are being sought for rapidly strengthening laboratory infrastructure to higher levels of biocontainment.
There have been attempts to provide improved biological containment facilities to meet these growing demands. However, currently available biological containment chambers are often expensive and difficult to retro fit into existing structures especially when one considers the short time periods available for attempting to control potential outbreaks of infectious agents. What are needed are more cost effective and readily adaptable biological containment chambers.